game programming

Full gameplay of .kkrieger, a first-person shooter by Farbrausch that fits into a 96KB executable by generating its textures, models and sounds procedurally.

A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.

Intro and gameplay footage of Rescue on Fractalus, the 1985 Lucasfilm Games title for Atari XL/XE, programmed by Loren Carpenter and David Fox. It shows the game's fractal-generated mountain terrain.

Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.

A short Dyalog demonstration building Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL, step by step. It shows how array operations replace loops.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

The climactic lesson scene from the 1983 film WarGames, in which the computer learns that the only winning move in nuclear war is not to play. It includes the character entering zero players and the famous closing line.

An early 2009 tech test by Notch of an Infiniminer-style cave game running about 700 fps on a 256x256x64 tile map. It is the prototype that grew into Minecraft.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

First lecture of MIT 6.00, an introductory computer science course taught in Python by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. It covers the goals of the course, what computation is, and data types, operators and variables.

Audio clips of the intro and technology quotes from the 1999 strategy game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, in male and female voices, covering techs 0 through 24.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

A bot built by Robin Baumgarten plays Infinite Mario using A* path-finding, shown as a red planned path that updates as new obstacles appear. It won the Mario AI competitions and uses only on-screen information.

Rob Pike's October 2009 Google Tech Talk introducing Go, a new experimental systems language designed for fast builds, concurrency and garbage collection. It covers the goals, syntax and type system.

The official video for Baba Yetu, Christopher Tin's Swahili-language choral piece written as the theme to Civilization IV. It was the first video game music to win a Grammy.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

Gameplay footage of the original 1986 Macintosh version of Dark Castle by Silicon Beach Software. The uploader argues the original is a great game that was tarnished by inferior ports.

Footage of Bungie's Jason Jones revealing Halo to the public at Macworld on July 21, 1999. It shows the early third-person version of the game.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

Tom Murphy's satirical SIGBOVIK 2007 presentation, delivered under a pseudonym, proving that generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete. It is a short, deadpan take on a complexity theory result.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

A 1080p widescreen capture of the Deus Ex conversation between JC Denton and the AI Morpheus. It is a philosophical exchange that includes surveillance as a replacement for God.

Lecture 1B of MIT's 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1986) with Gerald Sussman, covering procedures, processes and the substitution model. It includes the line about the power of naming things.

The secret project cutscene for The Planetary Datalinks from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, featuring a quote about free information flow as the safeguard against tyranny.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl code using Windows Vista's speech recognition, with hilariously bad results.

An Onion News Network satire about a Warcraft sequel in which you play a character who is playing Warcraft, in a cramped dark apartment.

A one-minute clip of the Warcraft II sound card test in setup, where the test sample plays and the voice says the sound card works perfectly.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

A short clip of Steve Jobs describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind. He compares human efficiency of travel to what computers do for mental work.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

Ian Piumarta's 2007 Stanford EE380 lecture on building a dynamic programming environment from the ground up, from the Viewpoints Research Institute's work. It covers the design of a language and system with a recursive design, parsing through code generation, and the COLA architecture.

A Nike commercial in which Michael Jordan lists the shots he missed and games he lost, saying that repeated failure is the reason he succeeds.

The introductory lecture of Stephen Boyd's Stanford Convex Optimization I course (EE 364A). It outlines convex sets, functions and problems, and the course's coverage of least-squares, linear and semidefinite programming, duality and interior-point methods.

Alan Kay's TED talk on teaching ideas, in which he argues the world is not what it seems and shows children learning through programming and building their own lessons with Etoys/Squeak.

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.